W&L’s Staniar Gallery Presents ‘Conceptual Boundaries’ The senior thesis exhibition will be on view from March 24 through April 11.

By Emily Innes
March 14, 2025

Washington and Lee University’s Staniar Gallery is pleased to present “Conceptual Boundaries,” the 2025 Senior Thesis Exhibition, on view in the Lenfest Center for the Arts from March 24 through April 11, with artist talks and a reception slated for 6 p.m. on March 24.

The exhibition and opening reception events are free and open to the public.

“Conceptual Boundaries” will feature the work of graduating studio art majors Brianna Benoit, Sarah Eaton, Isabella Griffith and Alyssah McGuire. The senior thesis exhibit is a requirement of the studio art major at W&L and builds upon the work started during the students’ junior seminar. Over the past year, this group of student artists has worked independently on a body of work that serves as the culmination of their undergraduate education.

As their debut into the art world, this exhibition allows the graduating seniors to display their work in a professional gallery setting and join an artistic lineage with prominent artists such as Liz Liguori and Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz.

Below, the students share, in their own words, the processes behind their featured works.

Brianna Benoit

My experience with cyanotype began with looking through my camera lens at waterfalls. The camera records my initial consideration of the qualities of falling water, light, rock and earth. Capturing visual information, the photographic negatives transcribe textures, layers, varied surfaces and movements into an image. Pushed further into the protracted photographic process of cyanotypes, these images are rendered in gradients of blue, which I then print directly onto glass, an effect that echoes aquatic hues and the idea of transparency. My work transposes the experience of viewing a waterfall into an object.

Sarah Eaton

My work is a collection of reinterpretations and tributes. I digest natural and everyday forms, and reform them according to the minimum necessary components to identify them. My need to translate ideas with immediacy and impulse led to the use of readily available materials like cardboard, scrap fabric and leftover gallery paint. My work takes a stance against traditional art industry values. I use recycled supplies to emphasize past and future relationships with the environment and communicate the ideal that art can and should be accessible and possible for anyone.

The skeletal designs are an ode to memento mori, creating a dialogue with the revived materials they are created with. The fusion between train cars and a skeletal serpent continues this conversation, representing existing systems that are overlooked and the possibility for future infrastructure. Each piece is a statement of gratitude for the moving parts on this planet that too often go unappreciated, including organisms in our local ecosystems, everyday objects, and our current and future transportation systems.

Isabella (Izzy) Griffith

My work investigates how screens, social media and the use of original characters and personas serve as an avenue for evolution, irony, dissociation and self-actualization. Through two time-based works, “Shattering Reality” and “I Hate Making Art So I Made Art,” I take an autobiographical approach to character design, donning the gaze of my characters to investigate the different worlds people create and view through videos on social media and the effects it leaves on everyday life.

Alyssah McGuire

This all started with a moment — when my brother and I were forced to walk around the block wearing the same t-shirt labeled “This is our ‘we will get along’ shirt.” After putting this moment to paper by drawing and writing about it, I began to look at other parts of my life from a different perspective. Interactions with my family, friends, peers, perfect strangers and the natural world gained new significance. In particular, I focused on birds, sourcing images, dramas and scenes from a birdhouse camera. When I discovered the art of printmaking through artists like Claudia McGill, Richard Bosman, Kathe Kollowitz, Kiki Smith and Edgar Degas, my interest in narrative form and imagery gained momentum and traction. My work centers on lived experience, deriving stories and generating imagery to reframe these moments for myself and for the viewer. I am interested in connections and communication with people and with the natural world, and I am curious about how filtering these experiences through the process of printmaking generates new perspectives and significance.

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For more information about the 2024-25 exhibition and programming schedule, visit Staniar Gallery’s website.

Staniar Gallery is located on the second floor of Wilson Hall, in Washington and Lee University’s Lenfest Center for the Arts. When the campus is open to the public, gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. For more information, please call 540-458-8861.